Even when the Lancashire people did not intend to be uncivil, their manners often asserted a sense of equality that I have never met with from the corresponding class in France. I have often stayed in Lancashire with a friend, now no more, who was one of the richest men in his neighbourhood, and in Lancashire this means great wealth. As there was an old intimacy between us, we called each other by our Christian names; he was Henry, and I was Philip. This was natural in our case; but what seemed less explicable was that when we walked out together and met the wage-earning people in the neighbourhood, the men would keep their hands in their pockets, and sometimes, as a sort of special favour, cock their heads on one side by way of a bow, and say, “Well, ’Ennery!” in token of friendly recognition. Assuredly there was not, in such a salutation, any trace of “savage enmity” against wealth, but neither was there any special respect for it. Either because rich men were common in Lancashire, or because the people were extremely independent, wealth used to get but a very moderate amount of deference there. [Sidenote: Lancashire Familiarity.] I lived at one time close to Towneley Park, and remember that although we always called the then representative of that very wealthy and very ancient family Mr. Towneley, till he became colonel of the local militia regiment, after which we gave him his military title, the peasantry spoke of him either as “Tayunly” or as “Charles,” and his brother they called “John.” This was not hostile, and it was not insulting, but it cannot be considered deferential. [Sidenote: The Author’s Experience in France.] [Sidenote: French Rural Civility.] In France I am known by sight to many hundreds of people in the poorer classes, perhaps I may say to thousands, and they believe me (erroneously) to be what they call rich, because I live in the manner of a very small country gentleman. More than that, they all know that I am an Englishman, a difference of nationality that would not generally tend to repress any tendency to popular satire. The simple truth, however, is that I have never once been insulted, never once even jeered at, by these poor French people, because I had a good coat on my back. On the contrary, numbers of people, whose names I do not know, are in the habit of lifting their hats to me; and if I drive along the road on a market day, when the peasants are returning to their homes, I have to keep my right hand free to answer their salutations by lifting my own hat, according to the courteous French custom. One of my friends, a Frenchman, is really a rich man, and when we walk out together in the town where he is best known, he is constantly raising his hat. I find this practice to be much the same in other towns with well-to-do men who are local notables, and I know an important village where any one who looks like a gentleman will be saluted by every inhabitant he meets.